Futurist.com: Futurist Speaker Glen Hiemstrahttp://www.futurist.com
This is the blog of Glen Hiemstra, futurist speaker, keynote speaker, futurist consultant, and Founder of futurist.comMon, 31 Oct 2016 18:34:31 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.149600806The future and energyhttp://www.futurist.com/2016/10/28/the-future-and-energy/
Fri, 28 Oct 2016 23:05:19 +0000http://www.futurist.com/?p=10371Early in October I had the opportunity to address the annual energy customer conference of the DHL company, in Houston. DHL provides extensive logistic support to the oil, gas, renewable energy sectors, from package to equipment delivery to warehousing services. The gathering in Houston consisted mostly of oil and gas exploration and service companies. The […]

]]>Early in October I had the opportunity to address the annual energy customer conference of the DHL company, in Houston. DHL provides extensive logistic support to the oil, gas, renewable energy sectors, from package to equipment delivery to warehousing services. The gathering in Houston consisted mostly of oil and gas exploration and service companies. The day-long conference focused on how they can use logistics to cut costs, which is imperative in a future world where they do not expect substantially higher prices for oil and gas. In my speech on the future and energy, I tried to nudge them toward an understanding that renewables are about to disrupt the traditional fossil fuel industry even further, not because they are more environmentally sound, which they are, but because, as manufactured technologies, renewables are becoming inexorably cheaper. Even natural gas faces this competition for electricity generation in the near future. Here is my slide deck…

]]>10371Self Driving Starts With Beerhttp://www.futurist.com/2016/10/27/self-driving-starts-beer/
Thu, 27 Oct 2016 23:21:01 +0000http://www.futurist.com/?p=10369Otto is an Uber-owned start-up materials delivery company, focused on developing self driving vehicles for industry. As you may have seen, they just did a test delivery in Colorado, a 120-mile beer run for Budweiser. Budweiser delivers 1.2 million truck loads of beer per year. If Bud can cut the cost of that, it makes […]

]]>Otto is an Uber-owned start-up materials delivery company, focused on developing self driving vehicles for industry. As you may have seen, they just did a test delivery in Colorado, a 120-mile beer run for Budweiser. Budweiser delivers 1.2 million truck loads of beer per year. If Bud can cut the cost of that, it makes sense. You will see here that the Otto concept is an add-on package to existing trucks, with the idea that a driver is in the truck to navigate the local streets, while the truck self-drives on the express ways. The driver can leave the cab, and rest, even sleep. What this potentially means is that a truck could work 24-hours a day, with fewer needs for driver sleep stops. Eventually trucks could drive themselves without humans from city to city, where they meet a local driver at a designated spot. Applied across the trucking industry, the number of long-haul trucks could be reduced substantially.

]]>10369The Future of Policinghttp://www.futurist.com/2016/10/14/the-future-of-policing/
Fri, 14 Oct 2016 16:12:30 +0000http://www.futurist.com/?p=10365As the summer of 2016 drew to a close, I was working with Scout, on the issue of the future of policing. We have recently been though a searing chapter in the story of the relationship between American citizens and American police officers. In our new communications age, ubiquitous video from fixed cameras, police cameras […]

]]>As the summer of 2016 drew to a close, I was working with Scout, on the issue of the future of policing. We have recently been though a searing chapter in the story of the relationship between American citizens and American police officers.

In our new communications age, ubiquitous video from fixed cameras, police cameras and citizen phones illustrated the ongoing story and brought it home so that we could not look away.

The Scout writers, given their focus on technology, take an excellent look at the upside and downside possibilities of several future policing technologies and strategies using them. Read about the pros and cons here, of techs like surveillance, predictive policing, artificial intelligence, and robotics. To the Scout list I might add, interestingly, driverless cars. If you consider how many recent police shootings in the news began with a traffic stop that escalates to violence, you have to wonder if reducing the number of such stops would help. As shared vehicle programs like Uber and Lyft continue to proliferate and are, perhaps, soon joined by autonomous vehicles at least in certain areas, one can imagine a future where police are basically no longer involved in traffic enforcement. Driverless vehicles will obey the law – they will not speed or blow through red lights. Camera and sensor enforcement systems can do the rest of watching the traffic. Police could be relieved of the fear of walking up to a car to confront a speeder, because they would not longer be on the road. Not to mention that driving drunk will be a thing of the past. This is actually potentially quite a huge development.

My contribution to the Scout piece was a conversation I had with Sohail Inayatullah, a long time futurist friend from Australia but really from planet Earth as he has become a leading global futurist. It happens that Sohail has worked quite often with police agencies in several countries and thus has learned a great deal about police culture. You can read at Scout his take on the future of policing, (as captured in our simple email conversation I hasten to add, thus it is not his whole perspective by any means). But I will also quote in full the Scout piece here…

A Vision of Community Policing
By Glen Hiemstra
There are few people in the world with both an accurate temperature of global police culture and the distance and independence to critique it. Dr. Sohail Inayatullah is one of them. A Pakistani-born Australian futurist, Inayatullah works with police departments around the globe to revolutionize outdated cultural narratives in policing and apply technology smartly.

I asked Inayatullah via email about his experiences with current police culture, his vision of the future of policing, and what needs to change to make that happen.

According to Dr. Inayatullah, there are several factors that keep problematic police culture relatively stagnant — a strong tendency toward fear and reactivity, the insularity of police, and the expectation that local police departments discipline themselves.

“Having worked for the last ten years with hundreds of policing executives, I no longer accept the ‘bad apple’ hypothesis,” he writes. “Instead, most officers know who are the ones who have real issues.”

“However, the ‘blue brotherhood’ ensures that, instead of being weeded out, they grow. It is not just one, but a supportive group. And their chief would know them.”

Therefore, Inayatullah says, “Even as strategies are created, culture eats them for breakfast.”

That stagnancy, Inayatullah says, is acting not just against the interests of the citizens that police are meant to protect, but against the future of police themselves.

“As the march of the right continues, a national police commissioner told me that his biggest fear was that his force had many Neo-nazi sympathizers,” Inayatullah recounts. “If legitimacy and public trust is lost, then private policing will take over.”

The key to turning things around, he says, is to foster a feeling of safety, both for police and the community. “Police need to find better ways to feel protected and safe, beyond the blue brotherhood.”

Here are Inayatullah’s recommendations for creating a new future for police culture.

1. Radical Community Leadership. Creating a new policing culture, Inayatullah believes, will require a radical new community policing narrative — a narrative that flips the script from that ‘thin blue line’ of separation to actively creating and maintaining community cohesiveness.

Inayatullah would like to see officers trained to act as radical leaders in their community — an idea he compares to conducting an orchestra. In this model, police would go well beyond what we have traditionally called community policing to “lead the way in the move towards prevention – upstream innovations. They [would] work with other co-producers of safety (teachers, community centers, etc.) to improve the community.”

2. National Police Oversight. Local police, he believes, need national oversight to create accountability for bad behavior within their own ranks. “Local police are unable to police themselves,” he writes. “Holland has recently done this.” (In the U.S. we count on the Justice Department to investigate abuses, and they actually do a decent job of this oversight, at least in recent years, but are infrequently called on to do such oversight.)

3. Diversity. Creating increased trust in police forces and cultural change from within will require, as Inayatullah puts it, “diversity, diversity, diversity and a strong HR director.” “Police must be better than their communities,” he writes. “More diverse, more progressive.”

4. Better Ways to Deal With Fear. Inayatullah recommends regular meditation courses that would help police unwind from fear and panic-based responses. “Police need to have training in meditation and mindfulness, to be able to take that deep breath,” he writes.

In addition to his own recommendations about what should change within departments, Inayatullah [has] been given a front seat into officers’ own desire for change. He has spoken with them about their futures and what they’d like to see emerge from within their own ranks.

“What comes out clearly,” he writes, “is policing that is about strategies that use new technologies; policing that continues to rapidly globalize, just as organized crime and terrorist groups are doing; and policing that is deeply ethical.”

“Their purpose is consistent,” Inayatullah said. “‘I wanted to make a difference, to be like Superman — not enter Alice in Wonderland.’”

A Layer Down: History and Culture

Scout does not in their piece directly delve into the historic and cultural roots that have led to issues with the future of policing, as I did briefly in an earlier post here at Futurist.com.

Ultimately the future of policing may come down to changing the story, changing the internal narrative.

The narrative Sohail recommends as an alternative to the “thin blue line” he calls “the conductor.” In this story or narrative, police would go well beyond what we have called “community policing” for decades, and they would go beyond adapting to a changing world. Police in our communities would “lead the way in the move towards prevention – upstream innovations. They work with other co-producers of safety (teachers, community centers, etc.) to improve the community. Instead of the “thin blue line” police have become “the conductor of the band.”

A couple of weeks ago I was in Arlington Texas, a large city west of Dallas, and with an “entertainment district” that is home to the Dallas Cowboys, Texas Rangers, and the original Six Flags amusement park. I learned that the Arlington Police have a special force and program that proactively works with the entertainment district stakeholders to plan carefully for each major event, and for the safety of the district as a whole. That is, prior to any problems, they sit down with stakeholders, plan for potential problems, and devise programming to prevent such problems. This, it seemed to me is the kind of orchestrating that Sohail was referring to.

[Scout is a new publication focusing on deeper dives into future issues and I am one of their informal advisors.]

]]>10365Journey to Mars Beginshttp://www.futurist.com/2016/09/27/journey-mars-begins/
Wed, 28 Sep 2016 03:02:58 +0000http://www.futurist.com/?p=10362The journey to Mars begins. Today while I was driving from Salt Lake to Park City, Utah, I was able to listen in as Elon Musk outlined the details of the vision for the trip to Mars – that is, the vision to send a million people to Mars. Just watch the videos… First, the […]

]]>The journey to Mars begins. Today while I was driving from Salt Lake to Park City, Utah, I was able to listen in as Elon Musk outlined the details of the vision for the trip to Mars – that is, the vision to send a million people to Mars. Just watch the videos…

First, the animation of the trip…

Then, the speech today in which Elon Musk described the vision and took questions…

]]>10362Interview: Future of Cars and Commutinghttp://www.futurist.com/2016/08/30/interview-future-cars-commuting/
http://www.futurist.com/2016/08/30/interview-future-cars-commuting/#commentsTue, 30 Aug 2016 22:50:37 +0000http://www.futurist.com/?p=10358Recently I was interviewed by “The Fruit Guys,” an interesting company and newsletter/blog in Silicon Valley. They deliver healthy food to companies, but write on all kinds of subjects of interest to the high tech community and other businesses. The focus of the story was the future of cars and commuting. I talked again about […]

]]>Recently I was interviewed by “The Fruit Guys,” an interesting company and newsletter/blog in Silicon Valley. They deliver healthy food to companies, but write on all kinds of subjects of interest to the high tech community and other businesses.

The focus of the story was the future of cars and commuting. I talked again about autonomous and shared vehicles, and the challenge of getting through the gap during which autonomous vehicles might share the road with human driven vehicles. I suggest that the gap might be managed by initially restricting self-driving cars to special lanes, zones or regions, until the car fleet has turned over (which take about 20 years).

]]>http://www.futurist.com/2016/08/30/interview-future-cars-commuting/feed/310358How to see the futurehttp://www.futurist.com/2016/08/23/how-to-see-the-future/
http://www.futurist.com/2016/08/23/how-to-see-the-future/#commentsTue, 23 Aug 2016 22:10:08 +0000http://www.futurist.com/?p=10356Last week I was invited by Popular Mechanics to sit down for a podcast interview on my futurist work, including how to think like a futurist. This was for their longer series How Your World Works podcast, which they make available on iTunes. There you can access the full 30-minute interview they titled “How to […]

]]>Last week I was invited by Popular Mechanics to sit down for a podcast interview on my futurist work, including how to think like a futurist. This was for their longer series How Your World Works podcast, which they make available on iTunes. There you can access the full 30-minute interview they titled “How to tell the future.”

The short segment in this Popular Mechanics piece focused on how to see the future, where I discuss the 3-part filter I use to judge the future likelihood of a particular development. Click the podcast there also to listen to the 30-minute interview.

]]>http://www.futurist.com/2016/08/23/how-to-see-the-future/feed/110356Travel the Universehttp://www.futurist.com/2016/08/19/travel-the-universe/
Sat, 20 Aug 2016 00:47:31 +0000http://www.futurist.com/?p=10355Come on human race, let’s develop the ability to jump in hyperspace and go see this amazing Universe! Or multiverse. Someday, I believe we will. Travel the universe, starting with our solar system this century.

]]>10355Digital Future Lifehttp://www.futurist.com/2016/08/08/digital-future-life/
http://www.futurist.com/2016/08/08/digital-future-life/#commentsTue, 09 Aug 2016 00:05:46 +0000http://www.futurist.com/?p=10350Our digital future life as seen by Cable Labs, an R&D outfit funded by cable companies. What do you think?

]]>http://www.futurist.com/2016/08/08/digital-future-life/feed/610350Greening the futurehttp://www.futurist.com/2016/07/21/greening-the-future/
http://www.futurist.com/2016/07/21/greening-the-future/#commentsFri, 22 Jul 2016 00:14:35 +0000http://www.futurist.com/?p=10339It’s an advertorial by Siemens called Greening the Work Week. Really quite good. In the Washington Post connected to article on the future of energy by Chris Mooney who is consistently great on science policy journalism.

]]>http://www.futurist.com/2016/07/21/greening-the-future/feed/110339Future of Retirementhttp://www.futurist.com/2016/07/21/future-of-retirement/
http://www.futurist.com/2016/07/21/future-of-retirement/#commentsThu, 21 Jul 2016 23:12:47 +0000http://www.futurist.com/?p=10335Let’s discuss the future of retirement in the United States. For a few brief decades after Social Security was established, and after World War II, a majority of Americans could look forward to relying on the proverbial “three-legged stool” for retirement income. The three legs included defined benefit private pensions, personal savings, and Social Security. […]

]]>Let’s discuss the future of retirement in the United States. For a few brief decades after Social Security was established, and after World War II, a majority of Americans could look forward to relying on the proverbial “three-legged stool” for retirement income. The three legs included defined benefit private pensions, personal savings, and Social Security. As recently as 1980 some 60 percent of private sector and virtually all public sector employees qualified for a defined benefit pension. When added to their social security, and any savings they had, a generation anticipated the most comfortable retirement in U.S. history.

That reality is slipping into the rear view mirror now, and current and future retirees are much more likely to rely for income on just two stools, personal savings (401K, IRA, savings accounts, home equity, etc.) and Social Security. Such is the system that has emerged over the past two to three decades as private pensions become a thing of the past, and defined benefit pensions disappear from the public sector.

In short, future American retirees are being counted on to save for themselves, and to live on whatever that savings may be, plus Social Security. So the question is, what does that saving look like right now?

This means the median household approaching retirement has a nest egg of between $10,000 and $20,000. This number is drawn down significantly because 41% of these households have no retirement savings whatsoever.

The GAO report points out that people at the low end of the savings spectrum do not necessarily worry or feel they will not have enough, perhaps because of a paid up house, a very modest living style, or whatever.

But, it seems to me that once glance at the chart suggests that in an economy where private pensions are literally disappearing and the personal savings expected to replace the pensions lag, we face a likely problem, perhaps even crisis, in the financial well being of the elder generation in the coming decades. It is insufficient to claim that people should just save more in a time of stagnant incomes. Thus we see increasing conversation around proposals to increase social security, something which I think is virtually inevitable in the coming two decades as elder poverty becomes real.